Craft Location-based Offers that Motivate Customers

Before you can craft an offer to make available through a location-based service (LBS), define the target market. Are you targeting your typical customer? Or trying to cultivate a new market? Once you have defined the target, you can craft an offer based on what you know about the targeted consumer. Ask these questions to begin to craft the offer.

Is your audience motivated by competitive offers?

Can you entice customers by making them feel like they get a special deal when they check in?

Will customers check in to your location and play a game to win a small, tangible reward, such as a free cup of coffee?

Can you get customers interested in a badge on your company’s Facebook Wall?

It may take some trial and error to come up with the optimized offer.

You can take a few different approaches, including the following, to determine what offers might be viable to test with your target consumers:

Find out what your competitors are doing.

You can look at companies that are similar to yours and see what offers they’ve tried that have resonated. Look on the venue page of the service itself or do a search on Twitter.

Re-examine your successes.

Consider what campaigns and/or offers have worked for you in other channels in the past.

Ask your customers.

While this may seem a little straightforward, sometimes asking can be the best way to get to the heart of the matter. If you have a Facebook page or Twitter account, float the idea by some of your customers and see how they respond.

If you don’t have a Twitter or Facebook account, consider setting up both as they help you in both your location-based and overall social media efforts in tracking and responding to customers on those networks.

Include links to both your Facebook and Twitter accounts on your venue page (if your LBS permits) so that customers can easily navigate to them.

Because many customers cross-post their check-ins from location-based services to other social networks like Twitter and Facebook, you might consider responding to them on that other network versus just within the LBS. This lets other customers know that you are paying attention and allows people that aren’t using location-based services to see that you’re running an LBS campaign.